- Author
- Posted by carlos-menezes, with replies from many commenters
- Published
- 31 August 2026
- Kind
- Hacker News discussion thread about a blog post
- Original
- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508608
- Subject
- Systems and hardware
What it is
Posted by carlos-menezes, with replies from many commenters. The thread discusses a werwolv.net post on ImHex, a hex editor with a pattern language. Replies share tips, stories and complaints.
What it says
- Commenter throneitlol advises making two saves that differ in one known way and diffing them.
- The same commenter says flat, high entropy suggests the file is compressed or encrypted.
- Commenter truekonrads says data is read back in only a few ways. These are fixed layout, run-length encoding and terminators.
- Commenter kstrauser tells how reverse engineering a motel's database file took about a week.
- Commenter pwdisswordfishq found ImHex crashy and gave up. Commenter issung had no such problems.
- Commenters name Kaitai Struct as an alternative that generates code in several languages.
- Some commenters suggest asking an LLM to help decode unknown formats.
What evidence it gives
The thread offers tips and anecdotes from practitioners. No code, benchmarks or tests are posted. One tool complaint is disputed by another commenter who had no such problems.
Interests and limits
Commenters speak from their own projects, and tips are unverified. The linked blog post was not read for this page. Several replies are about games or about LLMs rather than ImHex. The thread does not settle which tool is best.